[1][2][3] Studies of Indigenous rhetoric note that the many different Native American communicative traditions draw upon People-specific histories, multiple linguistic systems, geographically distinct though interrelated lands, and contemporary cultural, discursive, and academic modes.
[4][5] Ernest Stromberg writes, “Native rhetoricians appropriate the language, styles, and beliefs of their white audiences in order to establish a degree of consubstantiality.
In "What We Want to Be Called: Indigenous Peoples' Perspectives on Racial and Ethnic Identity Labels," Michael Yellow Bird argues that the term, Native American, alongside others like it homogenizes hundreds of unique tribal identities and cultures by grouping them under a shared rubric, threatening Indigenous Peoples' rights to self-definition; he also argues that emphasis on the exonym "American" in "Native American" makes the term susceptible to appropriation by majority cultures; a susceptibility which he understands as contributing to the elision of oppression and dominance.
For Yellow Bird and some of the respondents to his survey, tribal affiliation and terms emphasizing First Nations sovereignty are preferred forms of self-definition.
[8] Drawing upon the theories of Gerald Vizenor, recent scholarship has interpreted the written appropriation of imperial discourse in Sarah Winnemucca Hopkin's (Northern Paiute) and Charles Alexander Eastman's (Santee Dakota) literary work as rhetorical tactics of survivance that contest the reductive and stereotypical categories supporting colonial constructions of the vanishing "Indian.